Congress Attempts To Make Criminal IRS Behavior Illegal And Punishable; But Where Is Sarah Ingram?

A comprehensive tax-reform plan House Republicans will unveil this morning takes dead aim at what Republicans perceive to be the IRS’s persistent abuse of its authority. According to Republican aides familiar with the plan, it will curb the power of the nation’s tax-collecting agency, something Republicans have attempted to do since the agency admitted to improperly singling out conservative non-profit groups last May.

The legislation, authored by Ways and Means Committee chairman Dave Camp (R., Mich.), introduces reforms that directly address the circumstances that led to last year’s scandal. The specter of Lois Lerner looms large in the minds of many Republicans, and the plan mandates the termination of any IRS employee found to have taken official action for political purposes. The 1988 bill that restructured and reformed the IRS spells out ten actions for which the IRS commissioner must terminate an agency employee after an “administrative or judicial determination” that the employee has committed the prohibited action — among them, providing a false statement under oath on a matter involving a taxpayer and violating the rights of a taxpayer. Today’s bill would add the commission of politically motivated acts to the list.

The plan would also require the IRS to modify its interpretation of a critical provision of the Internal Revenue Code that has been used to protect the privacy of those accused of leaking confidential taxpayer records and to deny information to the victims of IRS abuse.

An unbelievably sad commentary, that this has not been policy at the IRS from day one: “The specter of Lois Lerner looms large in the minds of many Republicans, and the plan mandates the termination of any IRS employee found to have taken official action for political purposes.”

One further note: Lois Lerner may be the media’s poster child of IRS corruption and malfeasance, but I find it reprehensible that an even bigger culprit continues to be ignored: Sarah Ingram.

Ingram was Lois Lerner’s boss—she got huge bonuses several years in a row for “services rendered” to her political masters (the size of those gift checks necessitated approval directly by the President, and she visited the White House at least 165 times in just a few years!!!)—and now she’s in the Obamacare division, unleashing more destruction on us.